Hybrid terminals are now widely available worldwide in many form factors such as, for example, Set-Top Boxes (STBs), smart TVs, digital media players, Blu-ray players, video game consoles, digital hotel television systems, and so on. Hybrid terminals not only provide conventional broadcast television functionality, but also have integrated Internet and web access features such as, for example, access to the worldwide web (www) portion of the Internet. Thus, hybrid terminals are examples of technological convergence between computers and television sets/STBs and, hence, also include network-connected interactive devices that utilize television type display outputs. The software that runs a hybrid terminal may be pre-loaded onto the device, or updated or installed on-demand via an online application store (app store) or app marketplace, in a manner similar to what is done for modern smartphones.
It is noted here that the terms like “user terminal,” “client terminal,” and “hybrid terminal” may be used interchangeably herein to refer to a hybrid terminal—in any form factor—that supports connections to a broadcast network and a broadband network.
FIG. 1 illustrates a system 15 showing a hybrid terminal 17 connected to a conventional television broadcast network 19 and a broadband network 20. Some examples of the hybrid terminal 17 are provided in the preceding paragraph. For the purpose of the present disclosure, each of the networks 19-20 is considered to be a fully digital network. The hybrid terminal 17 may support playback of conventional broadcast television content through its connection to the television broadcast network 19 such as, for example, a terrestrial broadcast TV network or an over-the-air TV broadcast, a cable TV network, or a satellite TV network. Besides the traditional functions of television sets and STBs, the hybrid terminal 17 can also support delivery of online interactive media, Internet TV, Over-the-Top (OTT) content, as well as on-demand streaming media through its connection to the broadband network 20. The broadband network 20 may be an Internet Protocol (IP) based network such as, for example, a private IP network owned by a telco or cable provider or the publicly-accessible Internet. The hybrid terminal 17 may provide home networking access to record videos on a hybrid terminal-based local storage drive (not shown in FIG. 1) and may also allow viewers to search, find and play videos, movies, photos, and other content from the Internet, or through a cable TV provider or a satellite TV provider, or an over-the-air TV broadcast network.
Thus, the hybrid terminal 17 supports a model where broadcasted live (or linear) TV content is consumed through a digital broadcast connection supplemented with a digital broadband connection to the Internet. The digital broadcast connection may be, for example, an Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC), Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB), or Integrated Services Digital Broadcast (ISDB) based broadcast connection provided by terrestrial, cable, or satellite access based broadcast network 19. The digital broadband connection or “channel” may allow the hybrid terminal 17 to access additional audio-visual (AN) content that can be downloaded or streamed to the hybrid terminal 17, as well as a signaling path to back-end servers (not shown in FIG. 1)—in the broadcast network 19 and/or the broadband network 20—to retrieve additional information to enhance the broadcast experience for the viewer.
The hybrid terminal 17 may be a Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV (HbbTV) terminal that supports the broadcast and broadband delivery of entertainment to the end consumer. An HbbTV terminal provides a single user interface for delivery of digital broadcast TV and broadband TV to the consumer. The HbbTV terminal can operate over different digital broadcasting technologies such as terrestrial, cable, or satellite broadcasts.
Insertion of an advertisement (also referred to as an “Ad” or “ad”) in linear (or live) broadcast TV is traditionally performed using Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) standards such as, for example, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI)/SCTE 35 standard, titled “Digital Program Insertion Cueing Message for Cable” (2013), available at www.scte.org; the relevant disclosure of this standard is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. As part of such ad insertion, SCTE 35 markers—which may also be referred to as “ad insertion markers” or “splice information tables”—are carried in the broadcast content to indicate the presence of ad insertion points or “splice events.” A splice information table notifies downstream devices of splice events, such as a break in the network programming offering the opportunity to insert ads or a return from a network break. A splice information table, which pertains to a given program, is carried in one or more Packet Identifiers (PIDs) referred to by that program's Program Map Table (PMT).
The timing information provided through an SCTE 35 marker may be used by a splicer in the television service provider's headend. The splicer, functioning as an Ad Decision Manager (ADM), may query an Ad Decision Server (ADS) in the broadcast network 19 for an appropriate advertisement to place at an ad insertion point—in the Motion Picture Experts Group 2 (MPEG2) Transport Stream (TS) of the broadcast content—identified by the corresponding SCTE 35 marker or to replace an existing ad already inserted at the national headend. The splicer may perform such querying using the SCTE-130 protocol defined, for example, in the ANSI/SCTE 130-1 document, titled “Digital Program Insertion—Advertising Systems Interfaces Part 1: Advertising Systems Overview” (2013), available at www.scte.org, and in the ANSI/SCTE 130-3 document, titled “Digital Program Insertion—Advertising Systems Interfaces Part 3: Ad Management Service (ADM) Interface” (2013), available at www.scte.org; the relevant disclosures of both of these documents are incorporated herein by reference in their entireties.
The ADS may use data from back-end server(s) or database(s) such as data related to ongoing ad campaigns, regional demographic information, data about the channel being watched, and the like, to decide on the advertisement to be placed. The ADS returns this information—about the ad to be placed—to the ad splicer, which may then obtain the appropriate ad and splice it seamlessly at the ad insertion point. The MPEG2 TS, with such ads inserted by the splicer in the service provider's headend, is then delivered to the hybrid terminal 17.
The broadcast TV industry today performs the advertisement insertion or replacement using servers located in the facilities of the company providing or delivering the programming. These servers (not shown in FIG. 1) typically perform regionalized advertising insertion; the inserted ads are then broadcast to subscribers in the related geographical region. In some cases, the region can cover a number of small localized areas. Some advertising insertion servers can perform selection and insertion of an advertisement to an individual user level, but the operational overheads associated with these are expensive and complex because the servers must create a unique program stream for each user and deliver it using unicast techniques.
Terminal-based content insertion allows for personalized selection and playback of advertising. Some existing solutions, such as those used for program content delivery through Video on Demand (VoD), use a form of playlist for individualized advertising, wherein the items in the playlist—including pre-roll and post-roll advertisements—are created for each user and both the program content and the advertisements are delivered to individual users via broadband mechanism.
On the other hand, the MPEG Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (MPEG DASH) (where “HTTP” refers to Hypertext Transfer Protocol) Industry Forum is presently developing a specification which describes the format of a manifest file for performing advertising content selection for client-based insertion into a unicast streaming session to be implemented in smart TVs or other hybrid terminals.